Aileen Ryan, President and CEO, RAIN Alliance

Today we're delighted to speak with Aileen Ryan, President and CEO of RAIN Alliance, a global non-profit organisation advancing the adoption of RAIN RFID technology. With over 42 billion RAIN tag chips shipped globally in 2025, this technology is quietly revolutionising how industries identify, track, and authenticate everyday items - with major implications for financial services, supply chain resilience, and the future of retail.

My questions are in bold - over to you Aileen:

Who are you and what's your background?

I'm Aileen Ryan, the President and CEO of RAIN Alliance, a global, non-profit, member-led organisation supporting the development and adoption of standards-based RAIN Radio Frequency Identification (RFID), sometimes known as UHF RFID. RAIN RFID technology connects billions of everyday items to the internet, enabling different industries to identify, locate, authenticate, and engage with them.

I have always been fascinated by the unique opportunity technology presents to solve real-world problems, power systems that result in smarter outcomes, and make a difference to people's everyday lives. Almost forty years ago, I was inspired by Ireland's 'Year of Women in Engineering' and, at age 16, decided to learn 'how to make a computer do something'. I became one of just 12 girls in a cohort of 120 studying electrical engineering at University College Cork and have now spent over 30 years working in software and hardware engineering, deep tech, SaaS and ESG innovation for world-leading innovators including Siemens, TM Forum, and Motorola.

What is your job title and what are your general responsibilities?

I took on the role of leading the RAIN Alliance in 2022, with the aim of harmonising the RAIN ecosystem and establishing both the Alliance and our flagship RAIN in Action event as the dominant voice in the RAIN RFID ecosystem.

I spend a growing amount of time highlighting the role that RAIN RFID plays in industries where it has not previously had a strong use case. Much of my time is dedicated to speaking with influential regulators, legislative bodies and fellow standards groups to share the value of standardised RAIN RFID. This includes financial services, with today's lenders underwriting inventory, insurers pricing cargo, auditors verifying stock and regulators enforcing product compliance using data generated by RAIN deployments generate - with little to no awareness of RAIN technology or the benefits it brings them.

Can you give us an overview of your business?

The RAIN Alliance's mission is to help industries improve traceability, operational efficiency and sustainability by simplifying, standardising, and accelerating the adoption of RAIN technology through global collaboration and innovation. Having such a community is especially important given the sheer scale of RAIN usage around the world, with over 42 billion RAIN tag chips shipped globally in 2025, underpinning countless different use cases.

Tell us how you are funded?

As a non-profit organisation, we are funded by membership dues. This allows us to remain independent and operate for the benefit of the entire ecosystem, without having to make profit-driven decisions.

What's the origin story?

RAIN - an acronym derived from RAdio IdentificatioN - is intended as a nod to the link between UHF RFID and the cloud, where RFID-based data can be stored, managed, shared, and analysed to provide actionable insights in a variety of industry sectors. The RAIN Alliance was established in 2014 as a joint venture of industry leaders including AIM Global, Google, Impinj, Intel and Smartrac to advance RAIN RFID technology through standards, education and collaboration. Today, the organisation has more than 200 members and serves as the collective voice of the RAIN RFID industry.

Who are your members, and who ultimately benefits?

Our membership represents organisations from across the RAIN ecosystem, spanning chip designers, tag and reader manufacturers, software providers, systems integrators and brand owners. As adoption of RAIN technology accelerates, so too does the number of different industries in which it is being used, with retail, healthcare, aviation, logistics, smart packaging and food delivery just some of the exciting emerging use cases. With such a broad ecosystem, for all stakeholders and ultimately, the end user to benefit from the technology, it is vital that RAIN RFID remains interoperable, vendor-neutral, affordable and accessible across all companies, industries and geographies.

If you had a magic wand, what one thing would you change in how the financial services sector sees supply chain resilience?

That there is more to be done when it comes to solving supply chain disruption. In today's volatile climate, various stakeholders must deal with inconsistent documentation and manual resolution which can be slow and expensive, while often resulting in errors and delays.

Standardised RAIN RFID encodings can help resolve this by bypassing traditional documentation such as an inspection certificate or bill of lading, allowing the goods to speak for themselves in a language that every party can read identically. When every party has access to the same trusted and verifiable information, supply chains can operate more efficiently and avoid costly delays.

What is your message for the larger players in the Financial Services marketplace?

That there is a way to improve the quality of the physical-world data that institutions underwrite against. When a bank lends against inventory, it is lending against a stock count. When an insurer prices cargo, it relies on a shipping manifest. The gap between the record and the reality is real, measurable, and is currently absorbed as an uncertainty premium paid by the borrower.

Opportunity lies within requiring more detailed, standardised item-level data in your lending and insurance contracts. Early adopters will be able to directly verify the assets they are lending against or insuring, and will be better placed to assess and price risk which could provide a competitive advantage.

Where do you get your Financial Services industry news from?

A lot of my news comes from conversations with leaders in industries closely connected to financial services, including our members. Logistics operators discussing shrinkage. Retail loss-prevention teams, who understand the economics of unobserved goods better than almost anyone.

One of the genuine advantages of running an Alliance is hearing about deployments a year or two before they are publicly announced, and staying abreast with regulatory updates such as the European Ecodesign for Sustainable Products Regulation and Digital Product Passport, which will massively shape the data available to the financial services industry.

What FinTech services (and/or apps) do you personally use?

In recent years, the best fintech innovations are those that remove friction. For instance, digital wallets have made contactless payments so convenient that many of us don't even stop to think about it - it just works. This transition from innovative solution to invisible infrastructure is what we hope to further augment with the introduction of RAIN-enabled smartphones in the years to come, transforming how we identify, locate, authenticate, and engage with everyday items.

What's the best new FinTech product or service you've seen recently?

It would actually be discussions around removing a service altogether - the physical check-out. Shoppers can take what they want and leave, with the transaction settling in real-time as they leave the store.

The payments industry has spent a decade reducing friction at the point-of-purchase and so the difficulty in making this a reality is not on the payment side; it is item-level identification. In short, it's the challenge of knowing what left the building. Any technology that would require a battery or power source to be installed within every low-cost product to support this is economically unviable, and so the passive, item-level approach of RAIN RFID can help to make the truly frictionless check-out work at scale.

We're already seeing concepts for these "grab and go" retail spaces, and so as item-level identification solutions advance, I'm excited to see how this transforms the check-out process.

What trends do you think are going to define the next few years?

The most disruptive market trend we'll see in the next few years is the rollout of RAIN-enabled consumer smartphones.

When every shopper has access to a smartphone capable of reading item-level tags, the entire in-store experience will change. They'll be able to locate and compare products and get the same personalised in-store experience as they do online. The customer's RAIN experience won't just end upon leaving a store either, as they will have a record of their own possessions, accessible from their smartphone, each with their own verifiable identity, warranty position and service history.

It will also change how retailers manage stock, with every staff member having an affordable RAIN-reader device enabling enhanced inventory processes, returns procedures and loss prevention.

This growth in data availability will bring benefits but also raises the question of who owns the data. It requires a custodian that holds records on behalf of an owner, across issuers, durably and portably, without controlling them. These vendor-neutral records will also need to remain verifiable throughout the product's lifecycle.

For financial service providers, this will enable more careful management of capital. Insurance can be underwritten against a verified inventory rather than a declared one; resale and circular economy efforts will be supported by in-built product provenance, and warranty support becomes ingrained within the device.

Many thanks to Aileen Ryan for taking the time to share her insights with FinTech Profile. You can learn more about RAIN Alliance on their website.